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SAN ANTONIO — Tarik Esquerra has six kids in his house. He also owns six guns.

So when he learned that national retail chain Gander Mountain was giving away 50,000 trigger locks across the country over the weekend to promote firearm safety, he drove to the San Antonio store on the city's Northwest Side on Sunday morning.

“I had thought about it but hadn't taken the initiative to get one,” said Esquerra, 42, who said he currently stores his weapons in a safe or in cases but wanted an additional safeguard.

Making it easy for customers to obtain trigger locks and think more about gun safety was the goal of the giveaway by Gander Mountain, which sells hunting, fishing and camping equipment at nearly 130 stores across the United States.

At a retail price of $9.99 per lock, Gander Mountain's offer was worth nearly half a million dollars nationwide. As part of the safety promotion, the company asked customers to sign a pledge to secure their firearms.

The company's San Antonio store at 8203 Highway 151 had roughly 500 to 600 trigger locks and ran out by Sunday afternoon, said store manager John Watts. The store sells several thousand rifles and handguns.

“We sell the firearms,” Watts said. “We also want to make sure that the person who's getting the firearm is doing the safe, right thing.”

The free offer came amid an unceasing national debate about gun rights and firearm safety. On Sunday, the gun advocacy group Open Carry Texas held a rally outside a San Antonio police station to protest the arrest of 19-year-old Henry Vichique, who had been carrying a loaded rifle on the city's Northwest Side and was stunned with a Taser by police.

The group says a San Antonio ordinance prohibiting people from carrying a loaded rifle or shotgun on any public street is illegal.

Across the country, more than 600 people died unintentionally from firearms in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many were children who discovered untended guns and accidentally shot themselves or others.

The real number of unintentional deaths could be higher, according to a New York Times investigation published last year, because local authorities classify each case differently.

In Bexar County, the Times found a case in which the Medical Examiner's Office declared the death of 9-month-old William Reddick was a homicide. Reddick was accidentally killed in 1999 when his 2-year-old brother opened a dresser drawer while in the crib with him, grabbed a pistol and pulled the trigger.

The next year, the Medical Examiner's Office classified the death of Kyle Bedford, 2, as an accident. Bedford was killed in similar circumstances when his 5-year-old brother found a gun on a closet shelf.

“If you give 20 medical examiners all across the country one of these cases, you will probably get 10 saying 'accident' and 10 saying 'homicide.'” said Chief Medical Examiner Randall Frost. The details of each case are different, he said, and his office has tried to be consistent in classifying them.

The idea behind trigger locks is to prevent such tragedies. Gun owners can insert a lock into the trigger guard of a firearm to prevent children from accidentally pulling the trigger. The small devices can be disconnected with a key or number combination.